The Monitor. [volume] (Woodstown, N.J.) 1884-1892, 1887-02-25


itself triiling. If you could tell me all
about that snow fake or grass blade, you
would have found out God. And so
about any other seeming insignifcance.
Are not the five short syllables, the
baby spelling lesson 1--WE see as we are, ;"
full of meaning then? What the baby
says is this:--and he may well stumble
over it,-that in everything we look at
there is more than any one, even the
wisest, has yet looked at. And that the
depth of each ones present eye-sight de-
ponds on how much past insight he pos
sesses, that is, on how much IL is already.
| shall ask you to spend all the rest of our
time together in simply trying to see
farther into these two truths, by means of
illustrations.
1. IN NATURE.
First, in outdoor nature, the outward
universe we see what we are,--that is,
what we see is in proportion to our previ-
Gus knowledge.
Go with an artist friend into the fields.
He sees lights in the grass, tints in the
clouds, shadows on the mountain, which
your eye will hardly catch even when
pointed out "NIr Turner said friend
one day to HIM, "Mr Turner. never see
in nature the CLOVIS and the eolors You rut
into your pictures. "-Ah, don't you
wish You could, though?' was the paint
er's answer. We never wrote q poem,
never framed a drama, but
The poem hangs on the berry bush
When comes the poets cye,-
The street is full OF masquerade
When Shakespeare passes by.
Or read one of the great poems with a
poet friend. His face will flush, his
voice will tremble, while you are
cold and cven-toned. As he pauses
over this passage and that passage,
you wonder how you passed its beauty by
so unconscously. Go to Europe; what
you bring back in your memory and your
note book will be closely proportional to
the knowledge of history, and art, and
men, you carry with you. Humboldt spent
only five years in America, and it took
twelve quartos, and sixteen folios, half a
dozen helpers, and many years, to put on
record what he saw. You have lived here
fifty years, and how many folios and Sec
retaries would it take to write out what
You have seen? Most men find little new in
walk in the woods. or mountain tramp.
That same Humboldt walked up Nesuvius
with two of his friends one day, and the
world grew definitely richer in new know
ledge from that single excursion. Thoreau
wandering about the Conc ord woods or
along the Cape Cod beaches, would sight
new facts, as one picks flowers. "Did
you ever find an Indian arrowhead ~
asked his companion one day. so yes,
there is one" and he pointed at his feet.
He had within of extoling his own town
and neighborhood as the most favored cen
tire on the planet for natural observation.
81 think nothing is to be hoped from you,
he writes, IF this bit of mould under your
feet is not sweeter to you than any other in
this world, or III any world" He found
the red snow in one of his walks, and ex-
pected to find the Victoria Regia, and re-
turned Kanes Arctic Voyage to friend
from whom he had borrowed it, with the
remark that most of the phenomena noted
there might be observed in Concord" And
once he wrote 81 have never got over my
surprise that | should have been born into
the most estimable place in all the world,
and in the very nick of time, too A
scratch on a rock in Maine blue-berry
pasture would tell Agassiz that an iceberg
passed that way ages ago, OF that glaciers
once lay there and ground their course
southward. Toyou and me it is scratch
on a rock. A bit of chalk in Huxley S
hands will bring up facts not legends, of
the oozy bed on which the Atlantic cable
rests, and report how life went on at the
time the Dover Cliffs were formed. The
whole realm of nature, as it opens itself to
modern science, reiterates with every new
discovery the grand, inspiring, simple
law-men see in proportion to what men
are; eve- past sight counts into new
visions.
Even those sudden glimpses of great
truths, those maryels of insight at whose
mystery the world catches breath, exem-
plify, they do not contrayene, this law.
We call such glimpses inspiration, genius,
revelation. Whatever they be the new
seeing bears some proportion to the past
seeing. ''The great mind sees the idea in
the fact; the little mind sees only the
fact, IF that. Newton detects law OF
crayitation in the fall of ripe apple
from its bough. Only Goethe picks mp
deer's skull in the woods and exelaims,
'sThese skull-sections are but the spinal
vertebrae modified" Mayer draws blood
from sick mans arm in some trop-
ical country, and notices that the blood is
Of a brighter red than he has been wont to
see up North. To Mayer, but not to the
myriad doctors who had used their lancet
before, that brighter crimson was hint
sufficient to put him on the track of the
correlation of forces, the great scientific
| contamination thus far of the century.